Exclusive: Cast & Director Discuss The Thing

Winstead, Olsen, Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Heijningen

In anticipation of The Thing‘s release this Friday, October 14, Universal invited this site to talk about the prequel with director Matthijs van Heijningen and stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Eric Olsen and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. The setting? At The Thing maze, of course – one of the many attractions this year at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood.

Click on the player below for our interview with the Thing team and learn, if they were in the film’s situation, how they would want to die. By “thing” or other means?

The day after these interviews were shot, we had a bit more time with Van Heijningen to talk about the following topics we couldn’t squeeze into the video chat.

On the release date push from April to October and the re-shoots: “We felt we had to re-shoot some stuff. There was a lack of introduction about the Norwegians and I sort of made the mistake of presuming everyone would have see John Carpenter’s movie. I thought there were some things you don’t have to explain because you knew it already, but the studio told me a lot of people may not have seen the Carpenter movie and don’t understand the logic of the “thing.” As a fanboy, I thought, so we needed to add some things.

The score by Marco Belatrami: “I grew up with ’70s movies and I liked old thematic scoring where you put themes on things. Today, horror films are just a wall of sound and you can tell so much with music, I said to Marco, let’s do this the old fashioned way. I’m not trying to copy of Morricone, but we wanted to pay tribute and, of course, do more at the end with Morricone’s track.”

His favorite Thing incarnation in the film: The [name removed at risk of being a spoiler!] creature is probably my favorite. For me it was a tribute to the Norris spider head. It’s another level. Instead of a head, we use a torso with stuff coming out.



Source: Ryan Turek, Managing Editor

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